While Ysabet and Ashaun took a lantern twenty paces down the channel to examine where the lower end of the cage had jammed into the rock trough, Osha remained behind on the gravel step.
She sat down on a flat boulder four paces from Edris’s splinted left side, tucked her mud-heavy skirt around her ankles, and began wrapping her father’s water-stained expedition journal back into its oilskin cloth so the dripping ceiling would not blur the ink.
Edris lay still beneath Ysabet’s wool blanket for a long minute, his right hand still curled around the bottom bar of the black-stone cage while his breathing slowly steadied. Finally, he turned his head on the wet stone and looked across the lantern light at the young woman he had brought into the temple archive twelve years earlier.
“Do you hate me, Osha?” he asked quietly. There was no preaching left in his voice; he sounded like an old man asking the time of night.
Osha tied the oilskin cord with a neat square knot before she answered.
“When I was twelve and came up from the provincial school with mud on my cuffs and nobody to speak for me after my father vanished,” Osha said, looking straight at him, “you had a small table set by the south stove in the scriptorium so my fingers wouldn’t chap while I learned the old characters. When the senior bursar wanted to send me back to the laundry because my father’s accounts were unclosed, you…
